


An Unfriendly Voice

by fascinationex



Series: transformers fics by fascinationex [12]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, No Cybertronian Civil War, Non-Canon Worldbuilding, Seeker Trines, Starscream vs interpersonal skills, barbarian au, but without the barbarians, destroy the idea that starscream will ever calm down, mild starvation content, worldbuilding puree
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:40:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22091206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascinationex/pseuds/fascinationex
Summary: “Energon,” said Thundercracker, passing him a cube, which they had crudely marked into thirds. They were rationing, but it wouldn't last.
Relationships: Skywarp/Starscream/Thundercracker
Series: transformers fics by fascinationex [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1311599
Comments: 24
Kudos: 71





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Follows from [An Unkind Land](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21646114).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's kind of hard to say if starving will kill Starscream before his interpersonal skills do.

“Energon,” said Thundercracker, passing him a cube, which they had crudely marked into thirds. They were rationing, but it wouldn't last. Thundercracker had already taken his third, and Skywarp was watching Starscream with keen and intent optics. 

The energon inside left a sheen on the walls of the cube as it sloshed from side to side, and it moved a little more viscously than Starscream was used to. It wasn’t pure, which stood to reason: neither Skywarp nor Thundercracker was of a social class to afford pure fuel for their tanks. Jets were, on average, more fuel tank than jet. It put them in a tough position. The only mechanisms with jet alt modes who were usually topped off on good quality, pure energon, were high-ranking off world soldiers – and, up until now, Starscream, in his uncommon position in higher education and research.

Starscream did not actually _need_ quite as much energon as either of them, and he wasn't sure if they already knew that or not – but he chose not to bring it up to them. He drank down his third of the cube of oily energon and tried not to taste it too much. It was oddly gritty, a thing he actively chose not to contemplate.

They were just lucky that Thundercracker had had the presence of mind to shove any amount of energon into his subspace when Starcream had commed to say he’d killed someone and could they, please, come and get him. In Starscream’s own subspace, there was a diamond-tipped cutting tool, his own cloths, and some wax for spot-waxing, as well as the high-grade and polish he’d stolen from Grindgear after he’d blown his head clean off. The polish wasn’t very useful for a jet – too thin, although Primus knew it would _feel_ good out here – and the high-grade was a fuel of last resort, since it had deleterious effects on a mech’s mental state and judgement, and could make them sick. It would be better than starving, but there was a reason it was served at parties and not taken as a primary fuel. 

He passed Skywarp the final third of the cube without commenting on its quality, and Skywarp tossed it back like he really couldn’t taste the grit – or, Starscream allowed, like he was really, really hungry. How much energon did that warp drive require, even when not in immediate use? All components and systems had an energon cost, after all…

It wasn’t that he cared unusually about either of them, but there was absolutely no question that they would all need to rely on each other to function out here in these barren wastes. The idea that Skywarp might starve even before the rest of them made Starscream feel… unsettled, in a way he wasn’t sure he’d ever felt before. 

Not that it mattered. They weren’t going to starve. Not any of them. He fired up his internal navigation systems for long enough to be sure of his bearings, and then he pointed imperiously. “This way,” he declared. He began walking. Neither of the other two argued with him, although Starscream could almost hear the look they shared behind his wings. It didn’t matter. Later, they’d be properly ashamed of their lack of faith in him. 

The day was long and taxing on their systems. The air was filled with iron dust that got into their vents and although Starscream was reasonably certain of their direction and of the distances involved, it took hours upon hours for the landscape to begin to change. But change it did, slowly. The reflective, smoothly-coated ground changed to rough rock and minerals underfoot – probably, Starscream thought, this was some place where whatever extreme heat that had shaped the prior landscape had not reached. The outcroppings changed, too: the minerals that mounded up began to form peaks and troughs with greater frequency and of greater severity, so that the horizon was obscured now and again by hills, which made the walk even less energy efficient. 

This was so much worse a trip on foot than it had been by wing, but if they took flight they’d never make it the full distance – not if they wanted to land and still be useful, which they would need to be, were they to harvest crystals and refine them. On all sides, as the landscape became stranger, sharp and glittering structures of crystal rose, bouncing prisms of multicoloured light across them. In places they were so dense that the sun didn’t quite get through, and they left bizarre shadows dappling across the ground. 

The walk was long, and it felt even longer to three flight-capable mechanisms like themselves. But Starscream knew when they were approaching the right spot, because he could hear it. 

“What is _that_?” said Thundercracker, optics narrowing into a confused – and wary – zoom. 

The sound was strange: vibrating, thick, a thousand keys struck all at once and held in a long, mixed sound. 

“That,” said Starscream, feeling more excitement than anxiety for the first time in days, “is the sound of singing crystals. We’re close!” 

They were close, yes, but not as close as they sounded. The crystals existed in a series of huge, broad valleys in the metal ground, growing from the sides and the bottoms of the sheltered areas in between, and the noise of them vibrating, long and hard and strong, from each breath of wind that passed through, was evident from mechanomiles away. Even during his first pass, all those years ago, from the air, Starscream had not quite realised how _loud_ the crystals were, all vibrating at once. 

When they finally reached the them, climbing doggedly up that final rise, the roar was overwhelming. And then, when Starscream finally made it to the very top of the incline, the sound picked up until it was vibrating in his plating, in his struts, causing static to crack across his optical feed. 

He vented out, hard. 

_:Guess it’s not just a name:_ Skywarp said, tilting his head. _:Although I’m not sure I’d call that ‘singing’.:_

_:Is this safe?:_ Thundercracker wondered. 

_:No idea,:_ Skywarp answered cheerfully. 

The channel was three way, but Starscream ignored them. Beneath him, the incline dropped off sharply, opening up to the sight of a million glittering crystals sticking out, bristling from the sides of the first valley below like strange, beautiful, jagged teeth in the raw earth. 

They’d made it. 

His fingers flexed. 

“Now we just have to cut,” he said aloud. His voice was drowned out by the wailing of the air through the glittering crystals. 

The view was awe-inspiring: a steep drop that gentled out into a valley where jagged spires of crystal stuck out at all angles, glittering in the late sun and casting strange lights of their own. But the noise was _unholy._

_:You mean to go **in** there?:_ Thundercracker asked, not looking especially happy to be contemplating the prospect. 

_:Do you want fuel or not?:_ Starscream retorted, without looking away. 

Despite this comment, he knew that Skywarp and Thundercracker would be worse than useless out in a valley of valuable crystals. At least until such a time as Starscream had been able to experiment a little and refine the method of cutting for best processing. There was no point bringing either of them, with their untrained hands and clumsy over-armoured frames, any further with him for now – they’d just distract him and get in his way. 

Besides, on the off chance he ever _did_ get to publish, he certainly did not want to have to credit Skywarp or Thundercracker for this discovery – _Skywarp_ , for Primus’ sake, who hadn’t even known oil came from the ground until yesterday! 

No, Starscream would have to do this alone. 

He looked up to the sky, clear again now that they’d emerged from the quartz forest. _:Why don’t the two of you find somewhere for us to recharge safely?:_

There was still plenty of light, for once, so they would hopefully be able to manage something that wasn’t just a miserable huddle against a large rock. 

Thundercracker looked out over the crystal landscape again. He looked back at Starscream. He exchanged a glance with Skywarp, who shrugged expressively, wings lifting and falling. 

_:We’ll be in range. Keep the channel open and comm if you need anything,:_ he said neutrally, and turned away from the beautiful crystals and their hellish cacophony. 

_:I will,:_ agreed Starscream, which seemed to reassure them. Skywarp knocked his shoulder with a wing tip as he went, a friendly gesture that stung through Starscream’s minimal armour, but was not quite hard enough to damage the paint on a healthy mechanism. It sounded loud, usually, but was drowned out by the crystal song here. 

Starscream stiffly allowed it. Usually these gestures, for whatever reason, made his plating crack open comfortably, made cables wound tight below his armour creak and loosen just a little, but now… He wondered again, uncomfortably, about the nature of a trine courtship, and if there was something in these gestures that he was missing. 

There couldn’t have been, he decided, at length, as Skywarp and Thundercracker both headed back down the hill, where the sound of the wailing crystals was muffled by the rock and metal. They drifted together as they went, heads bent toward one another, wings in danger of smacking. 

There couldn’t have been, because they’d all been interfacing for years, and would doubtless continue to do so once they were assured of a steady stream of fuel. It could not be that such touching was inherently part of a trine courtship – unless such a ritual had been going on even without Starscream’s knowledge for _that long..._

He put it out of his mind. There would be time to obsess over that nonsense later. For now, he would not get any further unless he learnt how to cut crystals, preferably without shattering them utterly or cutting himself in the process. 

He cautiously picked his way over the rise and began to descend the steep decline. This close, he could feel the vibration of the crystals right through the ground underfoot, singing straight up his legs and his back, out along his wings, thrumming in his spark chamber. It rattled his helm. 

He drew the diamond-edged cutting tool from his subspace as he approached, gently checking its functionality. He had no proof it would work on crystals like these, but it was used for other minerals in the laboratory. The cutting edge was sharp and hard. It should do the job. If it _didn’t_ do the job, he’d be stuck improvising something else. 

The crystals were different shapes, angles, colours – all different, no two quite identical among them. The closest clump of them was in shades of rose through to grey-white, with a hexagonal section. They radiated outwards at all angles from a much less defined central mass, and put Starscream in mind of a starburst. Pale pink stripes crossed the ground and increasingly dense crystal clusters nearby, thrown there by the angle of the sun on their facets. 

Gingerly, Starscream reached out and laid the side of the cutter upon one flat crystal face. He waited to see how their singing would communicate itself through the metal surface and into his frame once they touched. It wasn’t so bad – more intense, but not unbearably so. He wouldn’t want to have to spend too much time in close contact, of course, but it wouldn’t hurt in the time it took to collect some samples. 

Starscream cycled the ambient gasses and their associated mineral dusts and particles through his vents, trying to steady the hard thumping of his fuel pump. It thundered along in his chest, trying to redirect fuel he couldn’t even afford to expend to weapons and defensive systems he did not need to use, a response directly proportional to his own anxiety. 

It was going to be fine. It was going to be better than fine, it would be a triumph. vAnd it was silly of him to feel nervous, because there was no significant danger. The minor risk of cutting himself on the shards and slivers was there, certainly, and the university’s regulations on exposure did float to the surface of his processor, briefly. But even the most minimal armour Starscream’s frame had been able to produce outclassed the plating on all but the most heavyset Autobots – their safety standards had never really applied well to him (or, in fact, to Skyfire – shuttles weren’t typically science frames, either). Unless he got crystal shards lodged right inside his vents, that danger was low. 

The cutting would be fine. It was the refining that he should be worried about, really. 

It was just that Starscream had never before been close enough to hear the crystals this loudly, or this clearly, and they were… shrieking, wailing like something out of an ancient sparkeater myth. They were so loud and so overwhelming, their noise was like a physical wall, a pressure he could feel weighing down the wind as it hissed against the sensors in his wings. 

On the one wing, Starscream was glad that neither of the others was here to see him dither and hesitate like this – and especially glad, right at this moment, that he hadn’t had a whole expedition at his back – but on the other, kind of wished he had made Thundercracker or Skywarp come down here with him now. No, they wouldn’t have been even slightly helpful, but he wouldn’t have been alone among these gleaming, screaming crystals and the whipping winds, at least. 

And in an emergency, if something had gone wrong, he could have shoved one of them in front of him. That, too, was an advantage not to be underestimated. 

He wasn’t sure what, if any, such emergency he was anticipating with this thought. He cycled his vents again. He was being silly, put off by the helm-rattling wail of the crystals and the deeply-embedded fear of failure. Which was stupid. Because he would never know success, either, if he didn’t try and trying meant, you know, actually _cutting the stupid thing._

He turned the cutter on with a click, thumb flicking over the dial where the indicators had long since worn away. He couldn’t tell he’d even turned it on successfully until he held it up and examined it. Both the sound and the dull vibration of the tool in his hand were lost to the noise and the unearthly thrum of the crystals themselves. He only knew it was operating as expected once he checked to make sure the blade was indeed spinning away. 

The blade spun so fast that the edges were a blur. The sheen of it caught the late afternoon light where it glanced off the crystals’ facets. 

It was fine, Starscream reminded himself. And darkness would be coming on before he knew it, so if he was going to get samples today, he needed to take them _now_ , before he lost the light. 

He didn’t have much idea as to optimal cutting shape or size, really, but he had a rough plan as to how his processing apparatus would need to be built, given the constraints they would be under out here in the wastes. He picked a spot on the crystal where the straight edges naturally showed some prior cleavage, little geometric designs where some kind of natural pressure had previously been applied. It should, if he managed a clean cut, render the resulting chunk of crystal a soft rosy-pink, hexagonal-section, and roughly the length of his forearm. 

He checked the tool again, as though it might have changed somehow in the intervening moments, and then lined up the blade with the crystal, careful of the potential for misaligning the spinning, sharp edge of the blade. It should have been a forgiving blade to cut with, sharp edges and plenty of weight behind it, but he had no idea what the true brittleness of the crystal might be, and he didn’t want to risk it. 

“Hypothesis,” he murmured, staring into its soft rosy depths even as he sealed shut his vents and tightly locked them down, “singing crystals contain a wealth of untapped, potential energy that can be harnessed...” 

The blade touched the crystal then, and in response it _screamed._

The sound roared straight through Starscream’s unprepared frame, one long, pure, wailing note of torment. 

It howled in every strut and plate and sensor, in every micron of energon in his fuel lines, in every seam and circuit, on and on and on. He rang like a struck bell, he cried like a clarion; and when he, too, finally began to scream, it was perfectly in tune with the one long, terrible note. 

The crystal sundered with a _crack_ that dropped him to his knees on the ground, echoing thunderously through the whole crystalline valley. The adjacent crystals picked up that sound, too, and it distorted their wailing. Starscream’s whole frame was screaming with them: he was alight, he was burning, nothing but a conduit for pure noise. Even the spin of his spark seemed to twirl itself, agonisingly, to the frequency. 

Blindly, he raised his hands to cover his audial sensors – the sensors wouldn’t turn off, too damaged now, and he wasn’t sure he could stand a single astrosecond more of the _noise_ – 

Something slammed into him and knocked his hand down. He screeched, voice melding horribly with the cry of the crystals, and yanked on his wrist, but – 

– Skywarp, it was Skywarp, he could smell him, the burnt ozone reek of teleportation – 

Skywarp had his wrist trapped in a tight grip and wouldn’t let him move his hand. Starscream clawed at him with his free hand, which meant removing it from where it was covering his audial, and then the _sound_ came back at full, inescapable volume. He slammed his helm into Skywarp’s armour. It didn’t help. It didn’t – 

_“Let me go!”_

“– going to cut your fragging head off!” Skywarp yelled, right at the top of his voice, so loudly that Starscream could hear the static. It was just loud enough to be heard amid the howling crystals. 

Starscream could hear him, but it didn’t make any sense, and in the moment all he knew was that he could not take a moment more of the noise, that his fuel was seething in his lines, that his error messages were blotting out every other notification his body was trying to ping him. Fuel too hot, audial receptors damaged, combat coding enabled, coolant boiling, combat coding disabled-- 

“Let go!” he screeched. Skywarp said something that was utterly lost to the noise, and then the whole world tumbled around him. He felt the impact of the ground but didn’t register it clearly: it was just pressure, and the knowledge that beneath him the ground was screaming too. It was dull and it was incomplete, but it was still screaming. 

Still, he fought, wildly, stupidly, blindly, clawing and flailing, and still Skywarp would not let go of him. 

Skywarp slammed his hand into the ground for what Starscream dizzily realised was by no means the first time. Something in his wrist threatened to give out with a dire little creak and a flicker of an error that was quickly obscured beneath another three audial ones. Starscream’s fingers released instinctively, and the cutter, still spinning, went flying across the ground. 

This time, when he tried to roll and curl up with his hands clamped over his audial sensors, Skywarp let him. The noise dulled – just a little – but his whole frame was a conduit for the frequency, and all he could do was vibrate and choke as the errors piled up. 

He gasped through his vents and got systems full of mineral dust when Skywarp immediately began to drag him away from the crystals. 

Starscream remained curled up and just… let him. When they hit a declining plane, Skywarp grabbed him by the scuffed red plating around his hip and heaved him up and over one shoulder. He kept going then, stride strong and implacable despite the extra weight. 

Starscream coughed. Even _that_ felt like it came out in the tone of the crystal he’d cut. He felt like it was in him now, singing in his fuel, like it would never, ever come out. 

_I should have cut a bigger chunk_ , was what he thought to that. He forced his optics online through a series of errors that he discarded in batches without reading. Only one of them was reporting any interaction with the ambient light; the other remained dark. 

“The – the crystal,” he rasped. His vocaliser seemed damaged. 

“Frag the crystal,” Skywarp snapped. Then, “Your optics are cracked.” 

Starscream snarled and kicked him. He must have hit something sensitive with his uncoordinated flailing, because Skywarp grunted and hefted him up against his shoulder to change the angle. 

“I’ve got the crystal,” said Thundercracker’s voice, unexpectedly. 

Starscream hadn’t even noticed him. 

“How do I turn this thing off?” he asked. 

Starscream scowled fiercely, trying to crane his head to get his arguably-good optic in the line of whatever Thundercracker was talking about. He couldn’t twist that far, but the further Skywarp marched from the crystals, the more of the other ambient sounds he could hear – including the buzz of the cutting tool he’d lifted from the university laboratories. 

“Turn the dial on the front,” he said. “Sunwise.” 

“I tried that.” 

“They take some time to power down.” Primus, he hoped it wasn’t broken. 

“Hmm.” He didn’t hear the click of the dial, but he did hear the change in the cutter’s humming that indicated it was slowing. At least that wasn’t broken. 

Starscream could still hear the scream of the crystals now, but they were distant and dulled. He could hear the crunch of shed metal and quartz beneath the feet of Thundercracker and Skywarp instead. He could hear Skywarp’s insides running like he was about to take off, much faster than the walk really required, even with the added burden of Starscream’s weight. His engine was operating at a stressed whine. 

Probably, Starscream figured, he was annoyed because if Starscream kicked it out here, they’d lose the only one of them who had any idea of where to get energon. These two might have been tough bruiser types – in as much as seekers ever were, anyway – but they’d be utterly lost out here without his expertise. Lost, and dead. 

It was, he allowed, worth being a bit scared about. 

Probably somebody should make Skywarp feel better. 

He looked at Thundercracker, who seemed to be content to sulk along in relative misery behind them. No help there. 

Starscream wasn’t very good at comforting. 

“It’s fine,” he tried, and patted him blindly on the thick armour of the outside of his thigh. “There’s no need to get all maudlin, Skywarp. I got the sample. It is… A… uh, qualified success.” It wasn’t a _failure_ , after all – Thundercracker had the crystal, didn’t he? “We’ll have fuel soon.” 

Skywarp’s engine made a singularly unhappy sound. 

“Great,” he said, in a tone that meant it was anything but. 

“It _is_ great.” Starscream said sharply. He did wish he wasn’t having this conversation slung over Skywarp’s shoulder like a sack of polish. He squirmed, a hint that Skywarp didn’t even try to take. “It means we won’t all _starve_.” 

“Do you think maybe it’s a bad idea,” Skywarp said stiffly, like he just couldn’t help himself anymore, “to, like, _die_ , for some wild crackpot theory?” 

“ _I_ ,” Starscream snarled, all thoughts of comforting the idiot forgotten, “am not a _crackpot._ ” He kicked him again, but his position over Skywarp’s shoulder had been changed and the best he got for his efforts now was a _clank_. Skywarp didn’t even grunt this time. 

He squirmed in earnest now, and Skywarp made a derisive little noise like he didn’t believe Starscream at all. But he did put him down – roughly, with little care for whether or not he could take or keep his feet. 

Starscream wobbled, blind on one side and not yet quite sure which way was up. His audials were still processing phantom noises. Or – perhaps the crystals were still just howling that loudly in the distance. Coupled with being tumbled around, the sensation made his fuel tank feel like it was flipping over. 

Skywarp ignored his unsteady weaving entirely and stormed past. Thundercracker grabbed Starscream by the elbow to steady him. “Easy,” he said quietly. 

“What’s his problem,” Starscream muttered, shoving his hand over his mouth like that would keep the fuel in, if it proved determined to come out. It stayed down – luckily, because they couldn’t afford to waste any amount of fuel in something as silly and mundane as _purging_. 

Thundercracker looked at him, a long and steady gaze with his dim red eyes, and Starscream felt the urge to look away. He fought it. There was no need to look away. Who was Thundercracker to have such an absurdly judgemental face, anyway? 

“He was just worried about you,” Thundercracker said finally. 

“Well.” Starscream tugged the pink crystal from Thundercracker’s arms insistently, and Thundercracker gave it up after the third or fourth tug with no further fight. “He doesn’t need to be. I’m fine.” 

Thundercracker’s gaze drifted up to Starscream’s optic – the one that wasn’t functioning correctly – but he just nodded. “If you say so.” 

Starscream sniffed. He almost preferred Skywarp’s aggression to whatever this was. Was Thundercracker making fun of him? He would have thought so, except that Thundercracker’s sense of humour didn’t tend in that direction – Skywarp’s did. He scowled harder. 

“Come on, it’s this way,” Thundercracker said then, sparing a glance up at the sky, where the sun was beginning to set. 

Starscream followed Thundercracker some distance, until they came to the entry to the forest of taller quartz spires, where the sun was even dimmer. Deeper inside, he could hear the soft hum of insecticons beginning to rouse – it fell dark earlier in the shade here. 

The quartz forest hummed, too, with echoes of the crystals in the valley, although they didn’t have anything close to their noise or range or fearful power. Starscream felt like he’d been tuned to it now, though, every circuit in his sensory network terribly sensitive to just that stimulus, and he could hear each breath of wind go past. He shuddered. 

Against a rise in the ground, and with two of the quartz growths jutting out of the ground, their tarp had been strung up and pinned. If they were careful, all three of them would be able to fit beneath it tonight without breathing in each other’s vents. 

It wasn’t exactly first class, but Starscream crawled gratefully inside, exhausted and more than ready to lay down and rest his aching frame for a good, long time. 

Thundercracker ducked down and came in after him. “If you still want to stay here when the sun comes up, we can focus on looking for somewhere to make a nest.” 

Inside, one of them had found and kept a chip of quartz that caught and diffused their bio lights, creating a strange mixed glow from their different colours. It illuminated Thundercracker’s blue plating and serious face pleasantly. 

A nest, Starscream thought drowsily. Hmm. 

He barely noticed when Skywarp appeared, about three seconds before the insecticons all came out, and made his way inside. 

“Move over,” he said, shoving at Starscream’s wing. 

Starscream grunted, curled harder into Thundercracker, and growled incomprehensibly. 

“Drop the tarp before something follows you,” Thundercracker advised on a sigh. 

Then, nothing. 

* * *

When Starscream woke up, startled out of recharge in the dim light of the morning sun as it drifted through the covering tarp, everything ached. 

He remained in the dimness, semi-aware of the pattern cross-hatched on the ground from the light coming through the small gaps in the weave of their tarp. For a few long moments he thought only of the ringing that didn’t seem to want to leave his processor, the ghosts of audial damage, and of the dull and endless pain behind his optics. The symptoms were maddening not because they were really that severe, but rather because they were so persistent. 

Turning off his optics did nothing for the sensation and the command to mute his audio pickup system didn’t even seem to function at all. The suffering seemed inescapable. 

Inescapable, too, seemed the unfortunate fact that Starscream could only see out of one of his optics – and his physical status readouts suggested that the lenses of both were cracked. Presumably it was the damage behind one of them that was stimulating all the sensors in his helm so unpleasantly, although the same pressure that had cracked the lenses had probably affected more sensors elsewhere… which, now that he was considering the matter, was probably why Starscream’s entire frame felt achy and stiff. 

His automatic repair system was functioning at seventy two per cent which, while expected given his fuel intake, recharge and overall stress, was not ideal. 

Short of cracking his own plating open and manually shutting down the affected systems, there was not much to be done for it. Even if there had been, they had such limited supplies – the best cure for any illness out here in these crystal-studded wastes would be energon, recharge and good luck. 

The thought of energon, aside from waking a persistent and nagging hunger, made Starscream remember the reason for all this suffering. 

He heaved himself up on all fours with a pathetic little groan and a creaking and cracking of stiff cables. Blindly, he patted around until his hand smacked not mixed-mineral dirt and metal, but the cool geometric shape of his hard-won crystal. Even in the shelter beneath the tarp, well out of the moving air, contact with the metal of Starscream’s hand made the crystal hum a muddy and confused note. Starscream flinched and grabbed it more firmly, until it stopped vibrating so enthusiastically. 

In the half light beneath the tarp the rosy colour of the thing seemed vastly more pronounced, and even more ominous – like energon and clear solvent, he thought, washed in swirls down a drain. But morbid thoughts weren’t going to get him anywhere, and his injuries weren’t likely to recover without fuel, so he needed to get to work, obviously. 

This thought had just completed itself in his processor when the tarp moved. 

Starscream jerked, looking up from his contemplation of the crystal at last. 

From the opening in the tarp, silhouetted in part by the too-bright light from outside, Skywarp regarded him critically. Starscream’s damaged optic overheated trying to adapt to the new light source, leaking coolant and hissing softly as it evaporated too fast. He could feel the dampness of condensation building on the inside his optical lens. Great. 

“You look like you went three rounds with a trash compactor,” Skywarp told him. 

“You’re no prize yourself,” Starscream sneered right back, before he could think any better of it. 

But if Skywarp was offended, he didn’t show it. “Thndercracker and me found somewhere better than here – we had to, the fragging crystals’re driving us mad. We’ll get packed up, walk over, and then you can fuel up and rest there for a few cycles.” 

“Are you mad?” Starscream demanded shrilly, shooting upright with a painful creak. “I don’t have time to spend _cycles_ resting, we’ll all starve.” 

He dimmed his optical sensors and staggered drunkenly out of their shelter. Outside, the warm sun gleamed in many colours, cast across the ground by the strange angles of the quartz ‘trees’. 

Skywarp made a noise, but got out of his way so he could emerge from the draped tarp. “Nah. We talked about it – if we can use some of our energon to boost a signal, we can probably get Astrotrain to bring some fuel outside the walls, ‘cause there’s some scrap out here that someone’s bound to trade him for, even if it’s only that creep, Swindle. So all we really need is some good copper, I guess –” 

He was gathering up the tarp as he rambled, apparently oblivious to Starscream’s mounting agitation and swelling anger. 

Starscream glowered fiercely. 

“You think I can’t do it,” he announced, flat and hard. 

Skywarp paused. “I didn’t say that,” he said, but then apparently he couldn’t help but to add, “I mean, not exactly,” at the end. “Listen, Starscream – It’s just. If we could cook energon out of screaming rocks, someone would have done it by now, you know?” 

A cable in Starscream’s neck made an ominous popping noise. His wings vibrated with tension. He bared his teeth, plating clamping down even as his wings rose sharply, irritated. 

“You think I’m glitching – or, or _stupid_ , or –” His voice, dramatic on a good day, soared into the upper registers effortlessly with the strain of stress. It was an impressively ugly sound. 

Skywarp huffed, but his expression, Starscream felt, said it all: he _did_ think Starscream was absolutely nuts, and neither he, nor Thundercracker had any faith that he knew what he was doing out here – even though it was _his life’s work,_ and even though they _claimed_ to be doing their part of some kind of trine courtship – 

Starscream clutched the crystal closer to his cockpit and tried to rationalise the absurd sense of hurt and rejection, but he failed utterly. And as with most feelings Starscream preferred not to have, he dealt with this one by getting angry. 

Frag what Skywarp and Thundercracker thought, anyway – two Decepticon seekers with less than half his education between them, what did they know? – and frag their whole ridiculous courtship – archaic, stupid nonsense. Even though he didn’t know what most of it was. 

He jammed the crystal into his subspace and turned, a little unsteadily, on the heel of one thruster. He wanted nothing so much right then but to get away from them both. 

Well, he thought furiously, not a single person who’d ever mattered had believed in him before, and if that hadn’t stopped him yet, he certainly was not going to let it stop him now. Not now that he’d already thrown everything away and wandered off into the wastes like – like – 

His plating rattled. A quartz spire loomed in his imperfect visual feed, diffusing light in bright prisms. He dodged it ungracefully but without breaking stride. His thruster hurt, so he slammed his heel down harder, annoyed, and it only made him more irritable that treating it roughly hurt more. 

“Starscream…? Starscream, come on,” sighed Skywarp after him, like he was very young and being meaninglessly recalcitrant. “I didn’t mean it like _that_ – but even if I _did_ where the hell are you going? There’s nowhere out here to go! Starscream!” His voice got more alarmed and urgent as Starscream kept doggedly walking away. 

Frag Skywarp, he thought, matching each syllable to one more aching step. He’d find his own shelter. He’d make his own damned energon. He’d never minded being alone, and it was a small price to pay for – 

“For Primus’s sake, I can’t believe _I_ have to be the mature one here,” Skywarp complained, crunching over the fragile silicate litter as he followed. “The insecticons are going to smell you and eat you alive,” he insisted, falling into step behind Starscream when his attempt to grab him was sharply rebuffed by one flailing hand. “What’ll you do with your fancy energon rocks then, huh? _And_ Thundercracker still has your cutter,” he added. “So you can’t get more of them, can you?” 

Starscream stopped, leaning against one of the tall quartz outgrowths, because this, at last, got through to him. He would need more than one crystal and he didn’t even like to think about how difficult it would become if he didn’t have the cutter. “Come on, Starscream,” Skywarp said then, sensing his advantage in Starscream’s pause and pressing it. “We found a nice little cave, we’re gonna pin the tarp over the opening – you can recharge without anyone rolling on your wings, how nice’s that gonna be? It’s not like you can’t still do – er, whatever you need to do – with that thing, you can just –” 

“Fine,” Starscream ground out, telling himself it was necessary just to shut Skywarp up, even if his arguments weren’t very compelling, because under the present circumstances Starscream stood no chance at all of outpacing him. If he kept walking away, Skywarp would keep following, and it seemed like there was a strong possibility that he’d just _keep talking._

Starscream could certainly get by on his own. He didn’t _need_ Skywarp or Thundercracker – he could survive out here on his own if he had to. He could. Even damaged like he was, he would… 

“I don’t need you, you know,” he said harshly. The words came out louder and more insistent than he meant them to, but they sounded – strident. Strong. Certain. 

Also mean, he realised the very moment he said them. But, well. Starscream reminded himself that he had never promised to be nice. 

Skywarp’s face went blank. There was no expression that Starscream could hope to read there, just smooth, blank, living metal. 

For a moment Starscream was absolutely certain that Skywarp was gong to turn and leave him after all, that he would abandon him here, alone and injured in the wastes. Just as Starscream could not outpace him, he could not catch up to him if Skywarp did decide to leave him behind. 

On the heels of that thought he wondered if what he’d said was really true. _Did_ he need Skywarp and Thundercracker? He might survive alone, but– 

A Cybertronian lived a very long time. And it would be a long time to be alone, a long time to be a genius without a witness, nobody to impress, nobody to be a comfort, nobody to… stimulate his thoughts. 

The sudden terror of those interminable, grey years out here all alone gripped him tightly, and the very moment his fuel pump began to thunder with that fear, he remembered, too, that Skywarp and Thundercracker could _leave him any time they wanted._

It wasn’t a good thought. He hated even the possibility of them having this much power over him. 

His wings were twitching erratically. 

A large part of Starscream wondered if it wouldn’t be wise just to cut them both out now, but… All that would do would be to ensure the outcome he sought to prevent. He heaved a vent out, and his plating loosened slightly. 

He forced a sickly half-smile. “I _**don’t**_ ,” he insisted. “But I would... _prefer to have you_.” 

That much, he was sure, was allowed. It only hurt a little to admit it, even. 

Skywarp ran his vents in a full cycle, a huge, deep sound. The plating Starscream hadn’t even noticed clamping down loosened, giving him overall a much less threatening appearance. 

“You sure don’t ever make things easy, do you?” he said cryptically at last, offering his arm to help Starscream balance on the walk back. 

Given the general trajectory of Starscream’s life until this very moment, the comment startled an ugly little laugh from him. It hurt his vents and hiccoughed into static.

Starscream pretended he hadn’t seen the outstretched arm and tottered along on his own. He would continue that way for as long as he physically could before lowering himself to lean on Skywarp. 

_No,_ Starscream thought sourly. _Never_.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Little note that Starscream finds violence hot, like he does in "A Guilty Mind" and if that's likely to bother you, this fic may not be a good read for you.

“Where is it, then?”

He could hardly believe he was anticipating the great luxury of a _cave_ , but part of him was delighted by the prospect of settling in to recharge in whatever sprawled out position he liked. 

“This way, I’ll show you,” Skywarp waved. 

The cave was dry, warm and dim, with only the light from the sky burnishing the opening a warm bronze. There were no obvious crystal growths inside and the floor of the cave was sandy relatively flat. Although there was evidence that a ferrowolf had taken up residence at some point, nothing living seemed to call it home – it was theirs for the taking.

Unfortunately, the cave _did_ seem to represent a great luxury that day. Starscream sank to his hands and knees just inside the entrance, chugged the tiny energon ration Skywarp handed him, and then promptly rolled himself inside their tarp – which cushioned the worst of the bumps in the ground – and fell back into recharge with the faint edge of a breeze drifting pleasantly over the exposed edge of one wings. He didn’t even hear Skywarp leave the cave.

He wasn’t completely sure what the other two spent their daylight doing – exploring, perhaps, maybe looking for any copper deposits freely available in the area – but he got the sense that the were never much further than a comm call away. 

When Starscream came to again, he had to dismiss another barrage of pointless errors in batches: yes, his optics were damaged; yes, his pain sensors were overused; yes, his audials were still ringing. 

He got to his knees, automatically careful not to smack his wings into a wall or the ground in the manoeuvre (his proximity sensors were working, at least), and used one finger to scratch out his plans into the loose mineral dirt on the floor. He would need something strong enough to contain the crystal while he heated it, which was the main concern – the potential energy that he would turn into energon energy was the primary value in the crystal, but it was also, he suspected, a thing that would make them volatile to heat.

He’d have to try, at least. 

“Thundercracker,” he said, when he saw him approach – empty handed, so probably just coming to check on Starscream, like he was an errant sparkling instead of an injured but totally functional mechanism himself. Of course. Well, at least he could make himself useful. 

“Starscream,” said Thundercracker. “You’re feeling better.” By this Starscream assumed he meant ‘you’re awake’, but it was true that he was also feeling a little better – his automatic repair at seventy per cent still meant that there were millions of tiny nanites doing _something_ to repair him.

“Yes,” he said, dismissively, and didn’t bother to ask Thundercracker how he was doing. He could see how Thundercracker was doing: the injury inflicted by the insecticon swarm on their first night was nothing more than a subtly raised bump and an unsightly unpolished spot. He was fine. “I need a ferrowolf. Ideally a large one.”

“A… _ferrowolf_ ,” Thundercracker repeated slowly. 

“Yes.”

“We're thinking of the same thing, right? This big, full of teeth and... teeth?" He waved his hand expressively.

And now he was just belabouring the obvious. Starscream would have rolled his optics, had they not been mostly broken. "Yes, yes, of course," he said, with mounting impatience. “We’ve seen them out here after dark.”

"...Alright, why?”

Starscream made an annoyed noise, but he supposed it was a reasonable question. “Come here,” he waved imperiously. “See this?”

“Uhh...” Thundercracker stepped closer, his footsteps vibrating through the ground, and bent to view Starscream’s lopsided half-blind scribbling in the dirt. Whatever he saw evidently didn’t enlighten him. “You might have to explain. A little.”

Starscream scoffed. Nevertheless, he jabbed his finger expressively at the scribble in the dirt anyway. “I thought about using a basin we could dig out, but given the possibility of it all _exploding_ , something sturdier is necessary.”

“Exploding would be bad,” Thundercracker said, in a tone more thoughtful than alarmed, then added, querying: “Sturdier?” 

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

He zoomed his optics in on the dirt scribbles. “And a mechanimal is, uh, it's – sturdier?” 

“Its spark chamber is." Starscream had not tested this exact set of variables, but -- "It must be.” 

Thundercracker nodded. “It does take a lot of work to breach a spark chamber on a mech,” he conceded after a moment’s thought—and entirely validated Starscream's theory, an accident that he would probably have been quite chagrined by had he known it. 

Starscream, of course, had precious little experience with putting a mechanism permanently offline. Grindgear had been his first.

Still, Thundercracker hesitated to agree to carry out Starscream’s order, which, given his actual capacity to enforce it, was in the end rather more like a request. “Our on board weaponry uses a lot of energon,” he cautioned at last.

Starscream’s on board weaponry, as comparatively light as it was, used what now seemed like an enormous quantity of energon just to fire a single shot, so he was certain that the heavier systems with which Thundercracker and Skywarp were equipped would be a drain.

“I didn’t say you had to _shoot_ the blighted thing. In fact,” he said, reasonably, “it may be better if you don’t. It would be better to get the spark chamber as intact as possible…”

Thundercracker stared at him for several looong, judgemental moments, clearly envisioning himself wrestling in the dirt with a ferrowolf. (And, no doubt, all its many attendant teeth.) He looked at Starscream like he was contemplating turning around, leaving, and never returning.

Starscream felt a dull pang of anxiety, which he quickly sublimated into annoyance at Thundercracker. 

“Just go get one,” he snapped at him, fed up. He swiped one hand through the scribble in the dirt, erasing it. “And give me that cutter.”

Thundercracker’s vents made a rattling noise when he cycled the air through them in an enormous sigh, but in the end he returned Starscream’s cutter and disappeared from the cave shortly after. 

Starscream just went ahead and assumed that he had gone to make himself useful and fetch the ferrowolf’s spark chamber, because the alternative didn’t bear contemplating. Instead of worrying abut that, he occupied himself with the equations he needed to determine the exact shapes and angles necessary to make the local quartz crystals – _not_ the singing ones – into lenses that would concentrate the ambient light enough for a beam to reach a temperature sufficient for his purposes. 

With a little luck, he’d be able to just boil tetradendihex out of the faintly yellowish mineral rocks in the area. It was a chemical extremely common in Cybertron’s crust, and it didn’t have to be pure…

His equations were rough, because he remembered only the general principles involved, and neither physics nor mechanics were his area of expertise. But after several feverish hours of work, he had what were probably the right measurements, and there was still enough light, so he went ahead and cut the lenses. 

By then, after all the scribbling and cursing, the cutting felt like the easy part, despite the squeal of the quartz and the heat beneath his hands. It did not compare to the singing crystals glittering deceptively in their pretty valley.

When Skywarp returned to their cave, it was to the sight of Starscream not sixty metres from its opening, surrounded by decimated quartz outcroppings and bits of crunchy silicate underfoot. He looked really half wild, with his cracked optics and unsteady gait, heaving a fresh-cut hemispherical lens up to balance over another, more gently curved one. Each round of material was as large in diameter as his own wingspan, and each was suspended, resting upon semi-stable structures of piled up rocks, and when the light of the local star hit them just right in the brightest part of the daylight… 

Well. For now, mostly, it merely melted what it came in contact with. Which was just as well, because it needed to be exceptionally hot. Starscream was pleased that he could already smell the heady, acrid reek of the tetradendihex coming out in the gasses, because if his chemoreceptors could catch the particles and identify them it meant that they were likely well-concentrated in the composition of the melted rocks.

“Hey, Starscream,” said Skywarp.

He glanced at Skywarp and then looked back at his lens. “It’s fine,” he assured him, although Skywarp had absolutely not asked. “When we use the ferrowolf, it won’t smoke so much.”

The smoke, he allowed, might be a little alarming – it was chartreuse, and thick, and drifted in heavy, sticky clouds. He’d put it downwind of the cave, though, so Skywarp oughtn’t complain. 

“When you… use the ferrowolf. Sure. Uh-huh,” he said, which didn’t sound like a complaint, _exactly_ , but wasn’t as enthusiastic as Starscream might have liked. “That’s cool. Cool, cool. That’s… uh, real cool. Anyway, there’s native copper out here, so that’s cool. I mean, that’s also cool. Additionally...”

“Cool,” Starscream finished drily, without looking at him. “Yes. I gathered. If you’re going to boost your comm signal anyway, you _might_ ask your friend, what’s-his-gears—” Strapper? Scorer? “—how we get oil from the ground.” It would be a lot more productive than trading for energon, because Starscream was thoroughly convinced that they’d start producing their own by midday tomorrow. Oil was another matter entirely, and his joints were already grinding subtly if he moved wrong. 

“Scrapper?” Yes, that was it. “You mean Scrapper?” Skywarp said, squinting at the structure. “Sure. I’ll ask if I can raise him. Is that going to fall over?”

“Absolutely not.” But apparently assurances from someone who looked like he’d flown face-first into a wall at mach three didn’t fill Skywarp with confidence—unfair, because Skywarp was hardly one to talk.

“Okay. You want to help me with this?”

“What?”

Skywarp waved his copper, which, true to his report, didn’t seem to be mixed with anything in particular: it was all dark and red, and had grown in little spiky geometric shapes, angling out from several confusing masses. Starscream wasn’t having an easy time seeing, so he sniffed in a quick cycle through his vents. Yes. Definitely copper. 

“I’m busy,” he said anyway. 

“Come on, Screamer. Come inside this nice, warm, safe cave and rest and help me with the signal.” If Skywarp thought he was being subtle… well. He wasn’t. 

Starscream made a thin, frustrated noise. But the light of afternoon wasn’t quite right for further experiments anyway, and his lenses would have to wait until tomorrow. 

“Fine,” he said, grudging. “But only because you are so very, very stupid and need my help. Now help me get this down – I don’t want it to break overnight.”

Skywarp looked up for a long few moments, examining the apparatus, and then he sighed. He shoved the copper into his subspace. 

The lenses were tricky to get down, but it was better than risking them being broken by the harsh wind or wild mechanimals after dark. As funny as it might be to watch insecticons slam face-first into the translucent surface, Starscream knew it was too brittle to risk. 

“Do you, uh, _know_ your wing’s smoking,” Skywarp wondered, once he’d boosted Starscream up high enough to manoeuvre the bigger lens and had nothing to look at but his aft in the air.

“Yes,” said Starscream. 

He would admit he’d let his appearance _suffer_ a little, perhaps, but it was in the pursuit of something grander. 

Skywarp was exaggerating, anyway – he made it sound as though his wing was spewing trails of smoke into the air, when what was really happening was that the ambient grime had gotten caught up in the tetradendihex release; they’d burnt off, sickly yellow, and now there was a coating of darker residue on the side of one of his wings, which very occasionally trailed very light puffs of smoke as it sizzled. 

It was nothing his polish couldn’t hold up against.

He let Skywarp take all his weight as he heaved off the lens, and then wobbled precariously as he lifted it. This would have been a lot easier had he the fuel to fly, but as it was, he had to rely upon Skywarp. 

“Don’t move around!” he snapped at Skywarp, trying to stay upright with his thrusters balanced in the other mech’s hands even as he moved the lens.

“It’s _you_ ,” Skywarp said back, aggrieved. “I haven’t moved!”

It may well have been him, Starscream knew privately. He could still feel the stiffness and the strange lurching ataxia he’d incurred during his crystal-cutting adventure the day prior. But he wasn’t about to admit that to Skywarp.

“I said don’t move!” he said again, ignoring his interjection, and let the quartz lens down as gently as he could. It still made a heavy _thud_ on the ground. There was a little cracking sound, which, upon leaping out of Skywarp’s hold, stumbling to the ground, and inspecting every inch of the thing, Starscream attributed to the silicate off cuts beneath it being unceremoniously crunched, and not any damage to the actual lens.

“It’s fine,” he said, relieved. 

“Oh,” said Skywarp flatly, “good. Great. Are we going in yet?” 

Starscream sniffed. This idiot.

Well. He’d show them both. No doubt they’d be a lot more interested in the welfare of their equipment once he had proof that it was going to keep him fed. “Yes, fine,” he sighed. 

Skywarp’s find of native copper was a strange blessing that he chose not to examine too carefully – he was due some good luck, for a change. However, even if it didn’t need refining, it still needed to be shaped into the wire coils they’d use. 

“I thought it was only important that it was copper,” Skywarp admitted. 

He was sitting in the shelter of their cave with Starscream, right near the mouth. His arms were wrapped around his knees and his wings stuck out obnoxiously, but there was something oddly cute about the way he peered so intently at what Starscream was doing. 

“Do _you_ know how to boost an internal comm system without using your own circuits?” Starscream wondered snidely. 

What Starscream was doing was less cute: flinching, over a heat source made out of burning minerals which had been lit, painstakingly, with a series of much less grand (and much less hot) prisms of clear crystalline material than the ones he’d just constructed, he was drawing the copper into thinner and thinner wires through the increasingly tender gap between two fingers. 

Much like the smoking grime on his wing, it didn’t do very much damage – but it lit up the sensors outside his armour, discoloured it slightly, and _smelled_. 

“Starscream… I don’t know how to boost an internal comm system at all,” Skywarp pointed out, peering closer. His red optics glowed from inside, and their light bounced little spots on the equally red-hot copper. 

“Well, keep watching. It’s high time you learnt something – you can make yourself useful with the next one.”

“Your armour’s so thin,” Skywarp said, like he hadn’t even been paying attention – which he probably had not, if past behaviour was any predictor. “How did it even grow like that?” 

Starscream rolled his optics. He’d never bothered to mention that it had been done on purpose, and that he’d been at great pains to preserve it, to either of them. He didn’t answer now, either. 

Predictably, Skywarp got immediately distracted again: “Hey, where’s Thundercracker?”

“I sent him looking for something,” Starscream said dismissively. “He’ll be back.” Hopefully, with Starscream’s ferrowolf.

A poor man’s communications booster wasn’t _just_ copper, but Skywarp had turned out to have several of the other components just kicking around in his subspace, and the rest could be improvised. 

Starscream pointedly did not wonder aloud what Skywarp thought he was going to need with a six-way cable adaptor just casually in his subspace like that was a _thing_ people just _did_ – Skywarp had picked Starscream up, most uncharacteristically for Starscream, at a gladiatorial match in Kaon’s arena. It was not that much of a stretch to imagine that he might somehow stumble into an orgy.

He fixed the last piece in place with some of the gummed up energon that had been leaking, yesterday, from his own cracked optic – which was absolutely vile, no questions, but it wasn’t as though he was doing anything useful with it. 

“Neat,” said Skywarp, brightly. “I guess we shouldn’t be in a cave when we try it, though...”

“Probably not,” Starscream agreed. “That’s a good thought,” he added judiciously, in an attempt to encourage the first sensible thing Skywarp had said all day. 

Skywarp shot him a dirty look at his condescending tone, however, so perhaps it had backfired.

“Seriously, where is Thundercracker? I can’t raise him.”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” said Starscream dismissively. He was not in fact at all sure that Thundercracker was fine, but he didn’t want to have a discussion about why that might be the case, because he had a hunch that Skywarp wouldn’t be thrilled by his sending Thundercracker out to kill a ferrowolf bare-handed all on his own. 

Luckily, even as he brought the matter up, he could distantly hear the crunch-crunch of approaching footsteps. 

Skywarp must have heard it, too, because he tilted his helm and his wings perked shamelessly up, wiggling happily. Starscream wasn’t quite sure if such an obvious physical tell was cute or just sort of pathetic. And why didn't Skywarp find these open displays of affection humiliating and degrading, like any civilised mechanism would, anyway? You could see those wings from a mechanomile away. Starscream sniffed quietly to himself.

The closer the footsteps came, the more obviously lopsided they were. When Thundercrcker at last ducked into their cave, hunching to accommodate his wingspan in the widest part of the opening, it became clear why: something had taken a bite out of his left foot. The thruster was punctured in a pattern concomitant with large, sharp, regular teeth of a triangular shape, and it was still leaking sluggishly onto the cave floor. 

There were long, curling peels of blue paint coming off where he’d been scratched, too, and his hands were scuffed right down to the bare metal. But – 

“Here,” he said, dropping his cargo and shoving it toward Starscream with his foot, even as Skywarp squawked at the state of him. 

“Thundercracker!” He lurched back to his feet. 

Starscream lunged for the thing he’d dropped instead. It was most of a ferrowolf, a body and three paws just beginning to turn properly grey with death, and entirely missing its helm. Its neck ended in a thick cord of cabling surrounded by support struts. The outer plating was singed around the edges in an irregular pattern where it had sparked erratically in death. 

Starscream would have bet that the missing head had teeth that matched Thundercracker’s foot and his slow-leaking puncture wounds exactly. 

“Put pressure on it,” he said aloud, without looking up from his inspection of the carcass that Thundercracker had brought to him. Although his damaged optics made it more difficult, the spark chamber of the ferrowolf did not appear to be compromised. There were no cracks or holes, no breaches that might have revealed rough treatment or even ill health. 

“Thanks for your concern,” said Thundercracker flatly. “My comm suite is repairing,” he added, mostly to Skywarp.

“Oh, this is _perfect_ ,” crooned Starscream without bothering to acknowledge his sarcasm. He tapped on the beast’s chest plates with his knuckles. Perfect. “Excellent, Thundercracker.” 

Thundercracker sighed heavily, blasting hot air out over both of them from his vents. “You’re welcome then, I guess,” he relented.

“Wait, why did you get that thing?” Skywarp wondered. “Is it for energon? We’re not that hard up yet, are we?”

There was a long pause. Thundercracker and Starscream watched him. 

“What?” Skywarp said defensively. Then, worried, he added: “Wait, we’re _not_ , are we?”

“You think he killed this thing so we could _drink its fuel_ ,” Starscream clarified. 

“Uhh… I mean, isn’t that what everything _else_ that lives out here does? They don’t have an energon well either, right—?”

“That is—absolutely disgusting,” Thundercracker said, looking at the greying body with an expression of sudden revulsion that had not been present earlier—and which might have seemed sort of odd, given that he was the one who’d killed the mechanimal in the first place. But it was understandable. Actually consuming the fuel of mechanimals? It seemed… vile.

Starscream looked at the headless ferrowolf pensively. “It _is_ disgusting,” he agreed, slow and speculative. “And it _is_ what everything else out here seems to do—except those with photovoltaic cells,” he added, for accuracy, although Skywarp’s optics glazed at the word ‘photovoltaic’. Starscream could almost see the screensaver loading right behind them. 

“Photowhat,” Thundercracker said. 

“Never mind.”

“Wait,” Skywarp went on, immediately not minding, “so if that’s not why, what’s the re—Primus, _Starscream_ ,” Skywarp cut himself off in a cry of disgust as Starcream swiped one finger through the energon leaking steadily from the ferrowolf’s frame and stuck it without ceremony into his mouth, where it dripped slowly into his primary intake. 

It was thicker than real energon, and it tasted… Starscream let his damaged optics fall offline for a moment. It didn’t taste bad, exactly, but it was a new taste, and not one comparable to anything he knew. Something smoky and acid in the aftertaste. His receptors didn’t know what to do with it, and gave him a hesitant error.

“Starscream,” Thundercracker, too, protested, “that’s gross. You don’t even know if it’ll make you sick. We can’t get your tanks pumped out here, either.” 

Thundercracker looked like perhaps _he_ was the one who needed to have his fuel tank pumped. 

“Thirty millilitres of spoilt energon wouldn’t hurt a minicon,” said Starscream, letting his optics flick dimly back on. “And now I’ll be able to let you know if the fuel changes the composition of my internal energon in any significant way over the next several hours. That will tell us if it’s safe to try in larger quantities.” 

It wasn’t that he didn’t have faith in his own process, because he did, but… he was going to have to start producing drinkable fuel very, very quickly, and although it would definitely work, he wasn’t sure if his process would be so easily refined. 

“Were you going to put pressure on that,” he reminded Thundercracker archly, nodding at his foot.

Thundercracker made a face, he was sure of it, but he did also move to do something with his foot. Outside, the shadows were long and the light was growing dim. 

“And then you can peg that polyethylene sheet down over the doorway –”

“The _doorway_ ,” Skywarp laughed. 

“—and tell us all about killing it.”

His vision would have had to be much more impaired than it presently was for Starscream to miss the sudden twitch of Thundercracker’s wings in response to that suggestion.

“Missing the arena, Screamer?” Skywarp said slyly. 

“I never attend the arena fights.” Starscream remained prim. 

“Come on, there’s nobody but us out here – no more Autodweebs to impress… and it’s not like we’re ever going back.”

The reminder was at once sour and oddly freeing. Starscream felt his own wings twitch, just a little, although what feeling they were trying to express he didn’t know. He liked Skywarp saying ‘we’, a tiny workaday reassurance. He licked his teeth.

The cave darkened significantly when he threw the tarp over the “doorway”, and then Skywarp returned only to sit down right behind Starscream with his legs – heavier, darker, sturdier – on either side of his hips. His arms draped over the top of Starscream’s wings and he knocked helms with him. Starscream could feel not just the warm air blowing from his vents but also the soft thrum of his fans on their lowest setting. 

“How about, while Thundercracker tells you all about how he tracked the terrible beast and fought it one-on-one to rip its head clean off,” he said, and they both definitely felt it when Starscream shivered a little, and nobody was surprised when Skywarp grinned and added, “ _with his bare hands_ \--” 

“That was totally not how it went,” Thundercracker said prosaically, but his dim red eyes were fixed on Starscream, and seemed very intent. 

“Shh,” Skywarp said, waving one hand at him. When he lifted it, its spot on Starscream’s wing seemed abruptly very cold for the loss. “So it’s not perfect. And it’s not a real mechanism, I guess, just a mechanimal, but I bet it was good to watch. All that fuel and scrabbling in the dirt. I bet you could hear their fans going for a mile –”

“Maybe _you_ should tell the story,” Thundercracker offered. He came forward, shifting onto his knees but not trying to stand in the small space of the cave. His face scrunched up as he crawled, annoyed at the changing pressure on his injured foot. It had stopped leaking now, though. 

“Maybe I will,” Skywarp decided. 

Starscream watched him crawl closer and didn’t protest when he twisted around and put his helm down upon one of Starscream’s own legs. His weight was warm and heavy, and smelled of leaking energon and cold metal and, faintly, of overused wires. None of them smelled that good, right now.

“So, no slag, there he was,” Skywarp dove in with enthusiasm, “having tracked the terrible beast back to its lair –”

Thundercracker huffed quietly. It might have been laughter.

Blindly, Starscream touched his helm. His laughing abruptly stopped, but he didn’t stop looking up at Starscream. In the dimness, the contact between their optics – even with Starscream’s as damaged as they were – seemed desperately intimate. The red light glowed dimly off the metal between them. 

“– surrounded by the snarling, growling –”

‘I was absolutely not,’ Thundercracker mouthed. Starscream snorted. 

“ _Hey_ ,” Skywarp interrupted himself. “Do you mind?” 

“Not at all.” Starscream rubbed his fingers across the sleek and smooth metal of Thundercracker’s helm. Thundercracker’s optics flicked offline. He rolled his head into the touch. Cute. “Go on. But get to the good bit.”

Skywarp squeezed the edges of his wings and tilted his head to rub the side of it right against Starscream’s, just enough to make the metal ring softly. “The good bit, huh,” he said, grinning. 

Starscream relaxed back into him by increments. 

“All right, all right. So he wasn’t _surrounded_ by ferrowolves. But he did have to tackle that one. You can tell, right? From his knees, where the polish is all messed up. So there it is, growling into his face – has to be, since he ripped off its front leg like that, you see the angle –”

It was strange, Starscream thought, even as he half-registered the soft insidious pleasure of having his wings squeezed and released, squeezed and released, all up the metal edges of them. Skywarp had a strangely excellent grasp of spatial reasoning, for someone who was regularly so scatterbrained. He could glance at the body of the ferrowolf and explain exactly where it had been facing when its limbs were removed not because it was the result of some intentionally learnt process, but because his warp drive required him to have such a precise understanding of where things were in space at all times. 

Skywarp squeezed again and the thought drifted lazily out of Starscream’s processor. He vented softly. 

“That’s it. There you go,” crooned Skywarp, and then continued: “I don’t think Thundercracker’s ever had to fight a mechanimal before, so while he’s ripping its arm off,” – ah, yes, a pretty solid strategy, if one was trying to disable a mechanism with a transformation sequence, but perhaps less valuable against something with teeth and claws and only blind instinct.

“And there it is, all bright glowing optics and teeth – you’ve seen them out here at night, prowling around, with their mouths all hanging open –” so they could draw the air in past their own chemoreceptors, which were, like most mechanisms’, probably in both their noses and their mouths. But Skywarp would not have thought of that, and it certainly doubled as an intimidating threat display “–showing off those teeth, half as long as our arm and sharp as knives.”

Hyperbole, Starscream knew, even without having seen the teeth of the ferrowolf in question. But he found himself nevertheless looking down upon Thndercracker with unusually poor judgement – which Skywarp, sap that he was, would have undoubtedly called ‘affection’. But it made Starscream feel vulnerable and upset to think of it in those terms – so he called it poor judgement and chose not to reflect overmuch on why.

“Are you listening,” Skywarp prompted. “This is the best bit.”

“I’m listening,” Starscream said, and forbore to roll his optics to the cave ceiling. He flexed his wing into Skywarp’s grip and was rewarded with another hard squeeze on his edge. His engine turned suddenly, loud in the silence, and rumbled into a low idling purr, which in turn made Skywarp hum at him in delight. 

“Right, right. So this thing is snarling and snapping all up in his face, and it’s loud as the pit, so he tosses the leg away and goes for its head – but it slips free and then it sinks those big frag-off teeth right into his foot. So now _it’s_ howling, and _Thundercracker’s_ yelling, too, what a racket –”

Thundercracker snorted softly, but he did not let his optics come back online. Starscream’s exploratory, soft-stroking fingers drifted past his jaw and over the sensitive cables in his neck. Thundercracker vented out, slow and relaxed, and arched into the touch of Starscream’s hand like a beautiful, heavily-armoured puppet drawn on a string. 

“– he can’t balance on one foot like that, so it takes him to the ground with it. That’s how he got those scrapes on his aft, by the way, don’t let him tell you different. Probably how his comm suite got knocked out, too. So there he is, sprawled out and wiggling around on his back, fluttering his wings with this huge, ferocious, powerful beast right on top of him, heaving and grunting and –”

At this, Thundercracker’s optics did flick on again, and he glowered fiercely up into Skywarp’s sly smile. 

“– _hem,_ on top of his poor foot, gnawing viciously upon his thruster,” Skywarp went on innocently. “And so he kicks it in the face until it lets go – smashes its optic, cracks its plating right down the nose in a huge fragging spray of energon, of course, and then he surges back to his feet. In the heat of battle – stop making that face, it’s a battle if I say it is, you had your chance to tell the story! In the heat of battle,” he continued, rubbing his helm against Starscream’s again as though for emphasis, “he doesn’t even know he’s hurt, until he sees the energon running down his plating later. But right now, he lunges for the big, ugly ferrowolf, with all its oil-soaked claws and fuel-slicked teeth. And it only has the three legs, right, so it’s not like it can outrun him anymore. He takes it in the side and slams it all squealing and howling down into the rock, and then he draws back one foot – the good one, probably – and he rams it so hard into its helm that it snaps the spinal strut. Bam. No more trying to run at all, right?”

“Right,” Thundercracker agreed placidly. He lifted his head a little, careful not to dislodge Starscream’s fingers, and inspected his ‘good’ foot. Starscream followed his gaze, but the light was now too low in the cave for him to make out a scuff mark. He could imagine it, though. 

“But that’s not it, is it?” Skywarp kept going. “Because even if it can’t use most of its body, those teeth are dangerous – he’s not gonna bring it back to us like that – and he wants the stupid fragging thing good and dead by now. So he hooks his hands – come on, Thundercracker, show us your hands,” he coaxed, squeezing the edges of Starscream’s wings again, making him shudder again. 

In the low light it was not so obvious, but Starscream had noted the scuffed hands earlier. Now he could just barely make out the colour discrepancy. 

Thundercracker obligingly brought both his hands up so Starscream could rub his fingers over the metal, feel the protected joints as they bent and the components slid and clicked gently inside with the smooth movements. There was exactly the difference in paint texture he expected: scuff marks. Thundercracker let one hand fall limp upon his canopy and brought the other up to Starscream’s face so he could vent through his mouth and taste the energon particles that lingered on the metal. His optics focused unerringly on Starscream’s face in the dark. 

Just like watching the arena videos that Thundercracker and Skywarp took of his favourite gladiators, the lingering scent of death and violence on his partners’ bodies unlocked something in his processor.

Starscream’s plating loosened automatically, without any conscious effort of his own, letting out a soft but unmistakable pneumatic hiss as it did. It allowed either – or, likely, both – of them enough space to slide their fingers beneath his light armour and touch and play with all the secret, sensitive components protected within. 

Thundercracker smiled, but did not immediately take that obvious invitation, and instead slid one finger over his mouth. It pressed down on his lip, and, all unthinking, Starscream parted his lips and let it sit there, breathing in through his vents and dragging the tastes and smells of the air past it. 

Thundercracker dipped his finger just inside the slick rim of his lip, just a little, and rubbed his fingertip gently upon Starscream’s tongue, feeling its texture. Starscream set his teeth upon it, carefully, and saw how Thundercracker’s optics went all dim and smouldering between one moment and the next. 

He held the optic contact. Thundercracker made a positively obscene noise when Starscream gently closed his lips and sucked. 

“– and ripped its head off, the end. Frag, gimme some of that,” finished Skywarp all in a rush, with about as much patience and class as Starscream expected of him. 

Thundercracker laughed softly, and then Skywarp bit one of Starscream’s wings and he shuddered from helm to foot and his fans startled up to a completely different intensity, blasting warm air across the cave. 

They barely even heard the insecticons begin their regular nightly drone outside as darkness fell, so completely were they distracted with each other. 

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked something about this fic and you're inclined to comment, please let me know below! Otherwise have a good night! :)


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